When Believing is Seeing
Annie Dillard wrote an essay called "Seeing" in which she talks about how difficult it is to see the things right before us. She describes a time she couldn't see the hundreds of blackbirds in a nearby tree until they flew off in a flapping frenzy. It reminds me of countless vacations where somebody saw something - an animal, a shooting star - and tried to point it out to someone else to no avail. Whales, in fact, are perfect sources of this sort of frustration, when everyone else seems to see them blowing water or breaching and I never seem to be looking in the right direction.This also reminds me, though, that sometimes we have to really believe in something in order to see it

Robbed!
You are going about your daily life, with all your dreams and hopes and plans, and you walk into your home and go about your business. But then something starts to feel wrong, and you can't quite figure out what it is, so you go about your business but with an impending sense of dread, and finally you realize what's ha

The Thing About Night Sweats
When women my age get together, it's inevitable. The conversation will eventually gravitate toward bodily functions - in particular night sweats. Sometimes it's almost competitive: who's got the worst case of them?But the thing is, they're not really that bad when you think about

Peace
I've been looking for peace. For years, I thought peace was an environmental condition, like clear skies and quiet rooms, and I figured that living in a household with a husband and three rambunctious boys meant that peace was way beyond my reach. I found lots of other things:

Why Ask Why
I spend a lot of time asking why.Why does my cat act the way she does? Why do my kids do what they do?Why can't I stop doing the things I should